If you've just seen Michael Moore's movie and are wondering how in the world the United States got diverted into the slow lane to hell, go watch Noam Chomsky's movie.
If you've just seen Noam Chomsky's movie and are wondering whether the
human species is really worth saving, go see Michael Moore's movie. If
you haven't seen either of these movies, please tell me that you haven't
been watching presidential debates. As either of these movies would be
glad to point out to you, that's NOT HOW YOU CHANGE ANYTHING.

"Filmed over four years, these are his last long-form documentary interviews," Chomsky's film, Requiem for the American Dream,
says of him at the start, rather offensively. Why? He seems perfectly
able to give interviews and apparently gave those in this film for four years.
And of course he acquired the insights he conveys over many more years
than that. They are not new insights to activists, but they would be
like revelations from another world to a typical U.S. resident.

Chomsky explains how concentrated wealth creates concentrated power,
which legislates further concentration of wealth, which then
concentrates more power in a vicious cycle. He lists and elaborates on
ten principles of the concentration of wealth and power -- principles
that the wealthy of the United States have acted intensely on for 40
years or more.

1. Reduce Democracy. Chomsky finds this acted on by
the very "founding fathers" of the United States, in the creation of the
U.S. Senate, and in James Madison's statement during debate over the
U.S. Constitution that the new government would need to protect the
wealthy from too much democracy. Chomsky finds the same theme in
Aristotle but with Aristotle proposing to reduce inequality, while
Madison proposed to reduce democracy. The burst of activism and
democracy in the United States in the 1960s scared the protectors of
wealth and privilege, and Chomsky admits that he did not anticipate the
strength of the backlash through which we have been suffering since.

2. Shape Ideology. The Powell Memo from the
corporate right, and the Trilateral Commission's first ever report,
called "The Crisis of Democracy," are cited by Chomsky as roadmaps for
the backlash. That report referred to an "excess of democracy," the over
engagement of young people with civic life, and the view that young
people were just not receiving proper "indoctrination." Well, there's a
problem that's been fixed, huh?

3. Redesign the Economy. Since the 1970s the United
States has been moved toward an ever larger role for financial
institutions. By 2007 they "earned" 40% of corporate profits.
Deregulation has produced wealth concentration and economic crashes,
followed by anti-capitalist bailouts making for more wealth
concentration. Offshore production has reduced workers' pay. Alan
Greenspan testified to Congress about the benefits of promoting "job
insecurity" -- something those Europeans in Michael Moore's film don't
know about and might find it hard to appreciate.

4. Shift the Burden. The American Dream in the 1950s
and 60s was partly real. Both the rich and the poor got richer. Since
then, we've seen the steady advance of what Chomsky calls the plutonomy
and the precariat, that is the wealthy few who run the show and get all
the new wealth, and the precarious proletariat. Back then, taxes were
quite high on corporations, dividends, and wealth. Not anymore.

5. Attack Solidarity. To go after Social Security
and public education, Chomsky says, you have to drive the normal emotion
of caring about others out of people's heads. The U.S. of the 1950s was
able to make college essentially free with the G.I. Bill and other
public funding. Now a much wealthier United States is full of "serious"
experts who claim that such a thing is impossible (and who must strictly
avoid watching Michael Moore).

6. Run the Regulators. The 1970s saw enormous growth
in lobbying. It is now routine for the interests being regulated to
control the regulators, which makes things much easier on the regulated.

7. Engineer Elections. Thus we've seen the creation of corporate personhood, the equation of money with speech, and the lifting of all limits under Citizens United.

8. Keep the Rabble in Line. Here Chomsky focuses on
attacks on organized labor, including the Taft Hartley Act, but one
could imagine further expansions on the theme.

9. Manufacture Consent. Obsessive consumers are not
born, they're molded by advertising. The goal of directing people to
superficial consumption as a means of keeping people in their place was
explicit and has been reached. In a market economy, Chomsky says,
informative advertisements would result in rational decisions. But
actual advertisements provide no information and promote irrational
choices. Here Chomsky is talking about, not just ads for automobiles and
soap, but also election campaigns for candidates.

10. Marginalize the Population. This seems as much a result as a tactic, but it certainly has been achieved. What the public wants does not typically impact what the U.S. government does.

Unless the trends described above are reversed, Chomsky says, things are going to get very ugly.

Then the film shows us a clip of Chomsky saying the same thing
decades earlier when he was still shown on U.S. television. He's been
marginalized along with the rest of us.

David Swanson is the author of "When the World Outlawed War," "War Is A Lie" and "Daybreak: Undoing the Imperial Presidency and Forming a More Perfect Union." He blogs at http://davidswanson.org and http://warisacrime.org and works for the online (more...)